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THE RIVER AND THE VOLCANO
Lights flicker eastward on the Columbia,
the river so wide, it hardly seems to flow.
Glistening waves lap against
the driftwood-spiked sand.
The cicadas begin. You hang
in the sky, another volcano,
rock-cowled face in a hood of snow.
The symmetry of you —
igneous flow
frozen to pitted lava.
Clouds shear off the Cascades.
Snow fields bloom into flower
fields: fireweed, avalanche
lily, the bleeding heart.
The road spirals down
the layered green of Oregon.
When I was beautiful,
what use was that moss
drooping from the branches,
vine maple’s baby hands
lacing the soft sun —
amid the volcanoes,
under shooting stars,
I was too young to tell
pain from love.
Years later, look, I flow,
I cast a shimmery
shadow on the shore.
And the moss covers
everything, even you.
~ Oriana
Mt. Hood*
HOW DICKENS MADE CHRISTMAS WHITE
In the UK, Christmas is usually snowless. So why do we still picture the ‘ideal’ Christmas as a white one?
It was 25 December, and little George Adamson ran to the window, hoping to find a white world on the other side. But once he drew the curtains, disappointment set in. It was another year without snow on Christmas Day.
Now, as a geography lecturer at King’s College London, he knows who to blame for his misplaced expectations: Charles Dickens, who populated his stories with snowy depictions of the holiday period.
That people like him imagine a snow-covered Christmas has always intrigued Adamson. In the UK, where he grew up, December is not a particularly snowy month – yet shops sell cards with white Christmas illustrations and restaurants decorate with fake snow. Where are people taking on these expectations if they haven’t lived them?
Scholars believe that it comes from cultural messaging. And crucially, from the very frosty decade of 1810.
In turn, the prominence of Dickens’ writings permeated our imagination.
Dickens “grew up during the coldest decade England has seen since the 1690s and his short stories and A Christmas Carol seem to owe much to his impressionable years”, writes anthropologist Brian Fagan in his book The Little Ice Age.
It was so icy during Dickens’s early years that the River Thames froze in February of 1814. London celebrated its final Thames frost fair that year, which included people setting up tents on the ice for four days and an elephant being led across the river just below Blackfriars Bridge. For the young Dickens, who was born in 1812, Christmas must have been a bitterly cold experience.
When the Thames froze over in 1814, London celebrated its final frost fair on the river
Years later, when Dickens sat down to write his novels and short stories, the author populated them with his memories of what Christmas looked like back then.
Christmas myth
But that doesn’t mean a ‘white Christmas’ has been common in the decades since.
While it might seem self-evident, the definition of a white Christmas is contentious – so measuring how often it’s happened is surprisingly complicated. The criteria that the UK’s Met Office uses to define a White Christmas is for one snowflake to be observed falling in the 24 hours of 25 December somewhere in the UK. By that definition, the phenomenon is not so rare – it has occurred more than 30 times in the past five decades. But go explain that criteria to a little girl looking out the window on Christmas Day.
“If that [situation of one snowflake falling] happens, no one would say there is a white Christmas,” Adamson says, although as a climate expert he understands the Met Office must have an official definition.
BBC Future asked the Met Office for more information about Christmas snow in the UK, as tracked by their more than 200 stations across the country.
Our suspicions were correct. The country being blanketed in snow – as in 1982 when 260 different locations reported snow on the ground – is atypical. Most years, no more than 20 stations report snow. In the UK, the UK Met Office explains, it is far more likely to see snow between January and March than in December.
So if it hasn’t been accurate in the UK for some time, why do we still mentally picture a snowy Christmas? And how can one man’s writing alter our collective understanding of a climatic phenomenon?
It helps that Dickens is credited, particularly in Britain, as the man who made Christmas fashionable again.
As the Industrial Age set in and people moved around the country, traditions were diluted and customs were lost. In the first decades of the 1800s, both Sir Walter Scott and Washington Irving lamented the loss of former festivities.
When Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843, Victorian Britain clung to its depiction of the idyllic holiday season, as many middle-aged Britons looked back nostalgically to the Christmas of their youth.
“In view of the fact that Dickens can be said to have almost singlehandedly created the modern idea of Christmas,” writes Dickens biographer Peter Ackroyd, “it is interesting to note that in fact during the first eight years of his life there was a White Christmas every year; so sometimes reality does actually exist before the idealized image.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181217-how-dickens-made-white-christmas-a-myth
*
WHERE CHILDHOOD MEMORIES GO
We called them fairy rocks. They were just colorful specks of gravel—the kind you might buy for a fish tank—mixed into my preschool’s playground sand pit. But my classmates and I endowed them with magical properties, hunted them like treasure, and carefully sorted them into piles of sapphire, emerald, and ruby. Sifting the sand for those mystical gems is one of my earliest memories. I was no older than 3 at the time. My memory of kindergarten has likewise been reduced to isolated moments: tracing letters on tan paper with pink dashed lines; watching a movie about ocean creatures; my teacher slicing up a giant roll of parchment so we could all finger-paint self-portraits.
When I try to recall my life before my fifth birthday, I can summon only these glimmers—these match strikes in the dark. Yet I know I must have thought and felt and learned so much. Where did all those years go?
Psychologists have named this dramatic forgetting “childhood amnesia.”
On average, people’s memories stretch no farther than age three and a half. Everything before then is a dark abyss. “This is a phenomenon of longstanding focus,” says Patricia Bauer of Emory University, a leading expert on memory development. “It demands our attention because it’s a paradox: Very young children show evidence of memory for events in their lives, yet as adults we have relatively few of these memories.”
In the last few years, scientists have finally started to unravel precisely what is happening in the brain around the time that we forsake recollection of our earliest years. “What we are adding to the story now is the biological basis,” says Paul Frankland, a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. This new science suggests that as a necessary part of the passage into adulthood, the brain must let go of much of our childhood.
Sigmund Freud gave childhood amnesia its name in the early 1900s. He argued that adults forgot their earliest years of life in the process of repressing disturbing memories of sexual awakening. While a handful of psychologists saw merit in this claim, the most commonly accepted explanation for childhood amnesia was that children simply couldn’t form stable memories until age 7—even though there was little evidence to support this idea. For nearly 100 years, psychologists assumed that memories of infancy did not endure because they were never durable in the first place.
The late 1980s marked the beginning of a reformation in child psychology. Bauer and other psychologists began to test infant memory by performing a series of actions—such as building a simple toy gong and striking it—and then waiting to see if a child could imitate the actions in the right order, after a delay ranging from minutes to months.
This work laid bare the contradiction at the heart of childhood amnesia: Infants can create and access memories in their first few years of life, yet most of these memories eventually vanish at a rate far beyond the typical forgetting of the past we experience as adults.
Maybe, some researchers thought, enduring memories require language or a sense of self, both of which we lack as infants. But although verbal communication and self-awareness undoubtedly strengthen human memories, their absence could not be the whole explanation for childhood amnesia. After all, certain animals that have large and complex brains relative to their body size—such as mice and rats—but do not have language or, presumably, our level of self-awareness, also lose the memories they make in infancy.
Perhaps, then, researchers reasoned, the paradox had a more fundamental physical basis that was common to people and other big-brained mammals. The question was, what?
Between birth and our early teens, the brain is still laying down some of its fundamental circuitry and thickening its electrical pathways with fatty tissue to make them more conductive. In a massive surge of growth, the brain sprouts innumerable new bridges between neurons. In fact, we have far more links between brain cells in our earliest years than we end up with in adulthood; most are pruned away. All that excess brain mass is the wet clay from which our genes and experiences sculpt a brain to suit its particular environment. Without such limber brains, young children would never be able to learn as much as quickly as they do.
As Bauer and others discovered, this adaptability comes with a price. While the brain undergoes this prolonged development outside the womb, the large and complex network of disparate brain regions that collectively create and maintainour memories is still under construction, Bauer explains, and not as capable of forming memories as it will be in adulthood. As a consequence, the long-term memories formed in our first three years of life are the least stable memories we ever make and highly prone to disintegrating as we age.3
In early 2018, Frankland and his colleagues published a study indicating another way the brain relinquishes our childhood memories: not only do they degrade, but they also become concealed. A few years back, Frankland and his wife Sheena Josselyn—also a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children—started to notice that the mice they studied performed worse on certain kinds of memory tests after living in a cage with a running wheel.
As the couple knew, exercise on a running wheel promotes neurogenesis—the growth of whole new neurons—in the seahorse-shaped hippocampus, a brain region that is essential for memory.
But while neurogenesis in the adult hippocampus likely contributes to the ability to learn and remember, Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University and others had suggested that it might also necessitate a certain amount of forgetting. Just as a forest has room for only so many trees, the hippocampus can hold only so many neurons. New brain cells might crowd the territory of other neurons or even replace them altogether, which could in turn break or reconfigure the small circuits that likely store individual memories. Perhaps, then, the especially high rate of neurogenesis in infancy was partly responsible for childhood amnesia.
To put this notion to the test, Frankland and Josselyn transferred infant and adult mice from the plastic shoebox-sized cages they had known all their lives to larger metal cages they had never seen before. In these new containers, they zapped the rodents’ feet with mild electric shocks. The mice quickly learned to associate the metal cages with the shocks, stiffening with fear whenever they were returned to those enclosures.
While baby mice began to forget about this connection after a single day—relaxing when they found themselves in the shock cages—adult mice never forgot about the danger. But when adults ran on a hamster wheel after the shocks—thereby stimulating neurogenesis—they started to mirror infants in their forgetfulness. Prozac, which also encourages neural growth, had the same effect.
Conversely, when the researchers hindered neurogenesis in infant mice with drugs or genetic engineering, the young animals formed much more stable memories.
To get a really close look at how neurogenesis might change memory, Frankland and Josselyn used a virus to insert a gene encoding a green fluorescent protein into the DNA of the mice’s newly sprouted brain cells. The glowing dye revealed that the new cells were not replacing old ones; rather, they were joining existing circuitry. That suggests that, technically, the many little circuits of neurons that store our earliest memories are not wiped out by neurogenesis. Instead, they are thoroughly restructured, which probably explains why the original memories become so difficult to recall. “We think it’s an accessibility issue,” Frankland says, “but it’s sort of a semantic issue too. If a memory becomes impossible to access, then it is effectively erased.”
This restructuring of memory circuits means that, while some of our childhood memories are truly gone, others persist in a scrambled, refracted way. Studies have shown that people can retrieve at least some childhood memories by responding to specific prompts—dredging up the earliest recollection associated with the word “milk,” for example—or by imagining a house, school, or specific location tied to a certain age and allowing the relevant memories to bubble up on their own.
But even if we manage to untangle a few distinct memories that survive the tumultuous cycles of growth and decay in the infant brain, we can never fully trust them; some of them might be partly or entirely fabricated.
Through her pioneering research, Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine has demonstrated that our earliest memories in particular are often insoluble blends of genuine recollections, narratives we sponged up from others, and imaginary scenes dreamt up by the subconscious.
In one set of groundbreaking experiments conducted in 1995, Loftus and her colleagues presented volunteers with short stories about their childhood provided by relatives. Unbeknownst to the study participants, one of these stories—about being lost in a mall at age 5—was mostly fiction.
Yet a quarter of the volunteers said they had a memory of the experience. And even when they were told that one of the stories they had read was invented, some participants failed to realize it was the lost-in-a-mall story.
When I was a toddler, I got lost in Disneyland. Here is what I recall: It was December and I was watching a toy train loop through a Christmas village. When I turned around, my parents had disappeared. Dread dripped down my body like cold molasses. I began blubbering and wandering the park, searching for them. A stranger approached me and took me to a giant building filled with TV screens playing feeds from security cameras all over the park. Did I see my parents on any of the screens? I did not. We went back to the train where we found my parents. I ran into their arms, overcome with joy and relief.
Recently, for the first time in quite a while, I asked my mom exactly what she remembers about that day in Disneyland. She says it was spring or summer and that she and my family last saw me beside the remote control Jungle Cruise boats, not the railroad near the entrance of the park. As soon as they realized I was missing, they went straight to the Lost and Found Center. A park official had indeed discovered me and brought me to the center, where I had been placated with ice cream.
It was unsettling to have what I thought was a pretty accurate memory so thoroughly contradicted, so I asked my mom to search our family photo albums for some hard evidence. All she could find were pictures from an earlier trip. We will probably never have any tangible proof of what happened. We are left with something far more elusive: those tiny embers of the past, embedded in our mind, twinkling like fool’s gold.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/this-is-where-your-childhood-memories-went?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
*
THE GERMANY WE KNEW IS GONE
When I recently picked up a rental car in Las Vegas — I was in America to cover the elections — the agent at the counter insisted on “upgrading” me to a BMW. “So you feel at home,” he said, looking at my German driver’s license, smiling. I took the keys and made a mental note: Outside Germany, Germany is still intact.
I often find this when I travel. Outside Germany, Germany is still a car country, home to a flourishing economy. Outside Germany, Germany is still a prosperous country, where everybody drives a BMW or the like. Outside Germany, Germany is still a well-ordered country, a pleasant place both politically and socially. I smiled back at the agent. But inwardly, I winced. Because in Germany, Germany doesn’t feel like Germany anymore.
On Monday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a vote of confidence at the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, officially ending his government. It was a formality: The three-party coalition had fallen in early November, when Mr. Scholz dismissed the finance minister, Christian Lindner, prompting his Free Democrats to quit the administration. The move left Mr. Scholz, a Social Democrat, with a minority government alongside the Greens. Rather than stagger on, he decided to call snap elections that will be held on Feb. 23. The no-confidence vote was a final piece of housekeeping.
At first glance, the story of the government’s breakdown looks like a rather dull “House of Cards” political thriller, centered on a budget fight. Underneath the noise, however, there’s an existential crisis. The economically prosperous, socially cohesive and politically stable Germany has gone. And this government, ideologically torn and rocked by outside shocks, proved unable to cope. How did we get here?
In the fall of 2021, things felt very different. After Angela Merkel decided not to run again after 16 years in office, Mr. Scholz defeated her Christian Democratic successor and formed the first three-party government in recent German history. Younger politicians like Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister, and Mr. Lindner came in. It was the first time the Greens, an economically left-leaning party rooted in the ecological movement of the ’80s, had shared power nationally with the Free Democrats, a pro-civil liberties and pro-business party.
In interviews for a book I was writing, many of those younger politicians talked about overcoming their ideological barriers to modernize Germany after Ms. Merkel’s long reign, which they saw as overly attached to the status quo. They talked enthusiastically about digitizing the country and promoting green industries. The energy felt genuine. Led by the steady, moderate Mr. Scholz, the government looked well set to tackle the country’s challenges.
But problems soon stacked up. The first was Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which threw the new government into crisis management mode: frantically buying gas on the international markets to replace Russian energy, trying to protect consumers and companies from soaring prices and organizing weapons deliveries to Ukraine. After Mr. Scholz announced a “Zeitenwende,” a turning point in foreign policy, the government allocated 100 billion euros to rebuilding Germany’s military.
All that came as the economy was faltering. While other Group of 7 countries are growing, Germany is about to register its second consecutive year of recession. Its signature businesses are struggling. Volkswagen, which employs about 300,000 people in Germany, plans to shut down manufacturing sites and lay off thousands of workers. Ford, Audi and Tesla have also announced layoffs, as has ThyssenKrupp, a major steel manufacturer. Once Europe’s standout economy, Germany has gone from leader to laggard.
The reasons for the downturn are complex. The abrupt end of cheap Russian gas is a big factor, of course, but so is the government’s agenda of green reforms, which — by phasing out coal and relying more on renewables — have exacerbated the cost of energy. That hasn’t helped German car manufacturers, who are struggling to compete with their Chinese counterparts. Some companies have clearly made poor decisions, but the government has failed to support them, too. Generally, the government is guilty of underinvesting not only in key industries but also in schools, railways and roads. Overall, the picture is grim.
All the while, a toxic debate on migration has been brewing. Since 2015, millions of people have come to Germany, including, most recently, roughly a million Ukrainians. The country’s attitude has been bipolar. On the one hand, the fact that Germany is a multiethnic, multireligious society is widely accepted. But on the other, there’s simmering discontent — periodically cresting into waves of anger — about immigration. The government has offered a similarly mixed response, at once making it easier for skilled workers to migrate and imposing strict border controls, with tougher asylum measures and more deportations. The approach hasn’t really pleased anyone.
These travails have combined to devastating political effect. In the face of so many difficulties, it has become increasingly hard to govern. The public hasn’t been sympathetic: Frustration with the government is widespread, its parties roundly disliked. In this febrile atmosphere, a newly formed pro-Russia party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, has prospered and the far-right Alternative for Germany has cemented itself as the second-most-popular party in the country. If the three-way coalition was an experiment in coping with the country’s fragmented politics, it failed. The timing, with Donald Trump ascendant and Europe in disarray, could not be worse.
Not all is lost, though. Germany’s crisis is real, but it is as much a crisis of confidence as anything else. Unemployment may grow but is still minimal. Our budgetary restrictions, far from a force of nature, can be overcome with political will. The party system is fracturing, but even the most divided states have been able to form governments: Next year we may well see the return of a stable coalition between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. Having integrated generations and generations of immigrants, there’s no reason we can’t do it again.
And yet it is worth paying close attention. Germany could be the canary in the coal mine for Western societies. Most of our neighbors and friends face the same troubles: the costs of transforming carbon-based economies, the perils of responding to new geopolitical challenges, the difficulties of achieving social cohesion. If Germany, that most temperate zone of world politics, is not able to do it, who is?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/opinion/germany-scholz-government-election.html?unlocked_article_code=1.iE4.Bsdw.3RRLuOxrv_F_&smid=fb-share#
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RUSSIA’S POPULATION TO SHRINK TO ONE HUNDRED MILLION BY THE END OF CENTURY
Putin has a dilemma.
He is very bellicose.
And his style of warfare is the meat grinder.
But Russia now has a negative migration balance.
And its birth rate is dropping. Russia is experiencing a significant decline in its birth rate, with the current fertility rate being significantly below the level needed to maintain its population, resulting in a shrinking population and concerns about a demographic crisis; this decline is attributed to factors like the legacy of Soviet policies, economic uncertainty, and a growing trend of delayed childbearing among Russian women.
Russia's current fertility rate is around 1.4 children per woman, which is below the 2.1 needed to maintain population stability.
The low birth rate is leading to a shrinking Russian population, with the number of deaths exceeding births.
That is why Putin is imploring women to have eight children.
And Putin will hit 1 million in casualties in April 2025 for his war in Ukraine.
Since 2021, Russia has experienced an average natural population decline of half a million people a year.
By the end of this century Russia will have fewer than 100 million citizens unless something changes. ~ Brent Cooper, Quora
Julian Banfield Randall:
It’s almost a rule of thumb that any politician who calls for an increased birth rate is planning a war. Women realize this and see no point in producing babies they’ll only have to grieve for 20 years later.
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WHAT WOULD RUSSIAN WRITER AND NOBEL PRIZEWINNER ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT THE RUSSIA/UKRAINE WAR?
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote in 1990: “Should the Ukrainian people really decide to secede, nobody would dare to try and keep them by force.”
Solzhenitsyn was the product of a Ukrainian mother and a Russian father. Despite wishing in his heart of hearts for a united and peaceful Slavic Russia-Ukraine nation, he was aware of the very real hatreds and animosities between the two peoples:
“…. time is coming for us, whether we like it or not, to repay all the promissory notes of self-determination and independence; do it ourselves rather than wait to be burnt at the stake, drowned in a river or beheaded. We must prove whether we are a great nation not with the vastness of our territory or the number of peoples in our care but with the greatness of our deeds. And with the depth of plowing what we shall have left after those lands that will not want to stay with us secede.”
Solzhenitsyn was a fearless champion of freedom in an age of totalitarianism. Elsewhere he wrote of war:
"Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.”
"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.”
“ I would rather have the United States as the world's policeman than the Soviet Union as the world's jailer.”
“Patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins, and penitence for them.”
Solzhenitsyn’s son Ignat has written of his father: “Surely, Solzhenitsyn’s exhortation for a moral component in politics, for a repudiation of all violence (not only of war), and for a balance of the spiritual and material, gives us much yet to ponder – even in a world dramatically transformed by the courage he enjoined and exemplified.”
In 2023, Russian Putin supporters, Russian academics and Russian trolls alike would do well to heed the remarkable words of a true Russian intellectual giant and patriot:
"The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us...than the need for any external expansion of our power. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle. ~ Richard Yates, Quora
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MORE ON RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA (Misha Firer)
I read wish notes addressed to Belarusian Ded Moroz (Santa) last summer and this is what I found out…
If you are a secret admirer of Putin, let me guide you from black-and-white fallacy. I will show you with personal research example how state propaganda works inside Russia.
Like, for example, in the Special Military Operation Barbarossa (called Great Patriotic War in Russia) between Hitler and Stalin, the Soviet despot is not necessarily the good guy only because the other one is the bad guy.
It was a battle between two evil regimes (both utilized concentration camps against its enemies) in which the Soviets with the assistance of the allies, forceful conscription and barrier troops won and wrote history as the victors always do.
My grandfather who fought in Winter War and Great Patriotic War in which he first was an invader of Finland and later a liberator of Russia and Belarus drew no clear distinction between the two.
In both cases he saw it as power hungry political leaders using forcefully conscripted peaceful peasants to kill each other in meat grinders for the personal ambitions.
He had absolutely no beef against the Finns or Germans and yet he was dragged from his parents’ home twice in order to kill them.
The nature of Russian statehood has not undergone any fundamental changes. It is still deceitful, tyrannical, corrupt and authoritarian with global ambitions.
VTsIOM or Russian Public Opinion Research Center does not research public opinion in Russia as the name claims it does.
The center receives instructions from the presidential administration about the questions they are allowed to ask and favorable results of the polls they are meant to present to the perplexed public.
As Russian satirical writer Saltykov-Tschedrin quipped: “Russian people judge authorities positively by their ability to surprise.”
For example, the public opinion center should be polling Russians: “When do you think Putin is finally gonna croak?”
They would get with high degree of probability the most popular answer “next year, God willing.”
If you mention the word VTsIOM to an educated Russian, they’d laugh hard. It’s like a good joke that never gets old.
VTsIOM “asked” Russians one wish they would like to ask Father Frost (Santa) this New Year. According to VTsIOM, the most popular request to Father Frost from Russians is victory in the special military operation in Ukraine.
By putting "Victory" and "Ending" into the same category, survey manipulator spun it like Russians care the most to win against the Ukrainian forces, while in reality Russians don’t care if they win or lose. They just want to see the end to this meaningless bloodshed.
Russians don’t want victory, they want the end to the war, peaceful sky above the head, and return home of the relatives who got mixed up in this madness.
Last summer I visited Ded Moroz Mansion in Belarus near the border with Poland. The House of Wishes was open and there was nobody around on a hot August afternoon. I sneaked in and did my own public survey research.
I read dozens of wish notes from Belorussians and Russian tourists (Belarus is the most popular travel destination for the Russians due to open borders, common language and culture) addressed to Father Frost.
These are just two of many wishes that I read on that day. Peace in the world. Peaceful skies. The end of war. That’s what people have been requesting from Ded Moroz.
I have not read A SINGLE WISH NOTE that asked for VICTORY in the Special Military Operation.
That’s what happens when the dictatorial state projects wishes of its dictator to those of the population. They do not correspond.
Russian people didn’t want this war. Didn’t ask for it. And they don’t care about victory, or whatever victory is supposed to mean.
They want the end to the meaningless slaughter of peasants for the Putin’s personal ambitions and greed. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Marc Fontaine:
“I have not read A SINGLE WISH NOTE that asked for VICTORY in the Special Military Operation.”
Brutalsky (i.e. Misha Firer):
Blindly go to the slaughter voluntarily. Nobody’s forcing them to sign the military contract. They do it for five million rubles.
*
PUTIN’S DREAM OF WORLD DOMINATION IS TURNING INTO A NIGHTMARE
In his annual news conference last week, Vladimir Putin claimed that Russia had suffered no defeat in Syria.
As Bashar al-Assad fell, Russian nationalist military bloggers turned on the Kremlin. “Ten years of our presence,” fumed the “Two Majors” Telegram channel to its more than one million subscribers, “dead Russian soldiers, billions of spent rubles and thousands of tons of ammunition, they must be compensated somehow.”
Some didn’t shy away from lambasting Vladimir Putin. “The adventure in Syria, initiated by Putin personally, seems to be coming to an end. And it ends ignominiously, like all other ‘geopolitical’ endeavors of the Kremlin strategist.” These weren’t isolated incidents. Filter Labs, a data analytics company I collaborate with, saw social media sentiment on Syria dip steeply as Assad fell.
It was in stark contrast to Putin’s silly claim at his annual news conference last week that Russia had suffered no defeat in Syria. Unlike social media, legacy media tried to walk the Kremlin line, but even here there were splits. “You can bluff on the international arena for a while – but make sure you don’t fall for your own deceptions”, ran an op-ed in the broadsheet Kommersant, penned by a retired colonel close to the military leadership.
He then used Syria as an example of how “in today’s world, victory is only possible in a quick and fleeting war. If you effectively win in a matter of days and weeks, but cannot quickly consolidate your success in military and political terms, you will eventually lose no matter what you do.”
Though the piece didn’t mention Ukraine, Vasily Gatov, a media analyst at the University of Southern California, told me he thought it was a message from the general staff to the Kremlin: be realistic about what we can achieve in Ukraine, too.
Assad’s fall is not just a blow to Russia’s interests in the Middle East but to the essence of Putin’s power, which has always been about perception management. His early spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky once explained to me how, when the Kremlin was weak domestically in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Russian leaders learned to dominate TV to create ersatz grandeur.
The Kremlin couldn’t really control the regional governors at that point, but it could give the sense that the president ruled everything by being omnipresent in the media. Since then, Putin has taken perception management to the international stage, trying to tell a story that he is leading a new generation of authoritarian regimes destined to inherit the earth. But that image suddenly looks shaky. Now is the time to apply more pressure before he can patch things up and project his superpower movie once again.
Start in Georgia, where protesters have been making a brave stand against the pro-Russian government’s decision to cease integration with the EU. At stake is Georgia being swallowed up in Moscow’s neocolonial sphere. Greater Russian ascendancy allows Moscow to put a stranglehold over gas transit pipelines to Europe and to manipulate access to Central Asia. The aim of the protesters is to get enough people in the system to abandon the ruling party and their de facto ruler, the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili. The protests are starting to bear fruit. Some diplomats and officials are defecting. The west can make it clear that the Georgian leaders are pariahs by sanctioning the politicians, businesses and security officials involved in the crackdowns.
Last week, the UK government got on the right track by hitting five officials with asset freezes and travel bans. The pro-Russian leadership has to be made to look vulnerable for those below them to abandon ship in enough numbers. The Kremlin failed in its attempt to use corruption and propaganda to derail Moldova’s journey towards the EU in a recent referendum. Georgians deserve to have their European aspirations supported, too.
Meanwhile, on the high seas, Europe has finally taken action against the Russian shadow fleet that transports oil across the world and sells it at rates above the limit set by the G7. The ships will now be stopped and boarded if they are not properly insured. Eddie Fishman of Columbia University argues this is the moment to cripple the Kremlin’s crucial oil revenues by putting secondary sanctions on entities that buy the above-price oil. That will scare off the Indian and Emirati traders who carry on doing business with Russia and, in turn, increase the stress on a Russian economy where business leaders are already complaining the system is unsustainable. Despite Kremlin claims that all is dandy with the economy, Russians aren’t buying it, complaining online that inflation is making their salaries feel worthless.
And though the Kremlin maintains Russia and China are an alliance made in economic heaven, the reality is more tenuous. Russian businesses are saying that Chinese banks will no longer work with them now that Russian institutions have been blacklisted by the US. Instead, they worry that the Chinese are offering them “deeply suspicious” ways to move money – yet they have no choice but to play along.
The Kremlin will be more than aware of these complaints throughout society, from military bloggers to business people. There are no signs of democratic uprisings. Putin fears no elections. But it worries when people don’t do as it commands. The Russian president often recalculates when he sees that he can’t control perceptions and behaviors – thus, he abandoned mobilization efforts after the last attempts saw up to a million young Russians flee the country.
Bahmut
As the West increases pressure points on Russia, the aim is not some magical regime change. The point is to make the leadership feel so unsure it rethinks what it can get away with. For that, the pressure on Putin has to come thick and fast, with one blow coming after another in unexpected succession, unraveling the stories of international influence he has spun. Ukraine is taking direct action: with drone strikes at military production sites ever deeper within Russia and the spectacular assassination of a Russian general in the heart of Moscow. But its democratic allies can do much more by relearning the art of economic and political warfare.
Joe Biden’s flawed approach was always to wait until after a Russian crisis, and then let Putin recover and regroup. Can Donald Trump try something more dynamic? Or will he believe Putin’s bluster even more than Biden? The paradox would then be that the US believed in Putin’s myth of imperviousness more than many Russians. The most important “perception management” Vladimir Putin is banking on is the one aimed at the White House itself.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/22/with-assads-fall-putins-dream-of-world-domination-is-turning-into-a-nightmare
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WHAT LIFE WAS LIKE IN THE SOVIET UNION
Soviet butcher shop
When the Bolsheviks orchestrated the anti-democratic coup in 1917 (aka “Great October Socialistic Revolution”), the slogan was “Get rid of the rich!” They succeeded — in the Soviet state, everyone was equally poor.
The main feature of the Soviet society was poverty, equally spread across all strata of the population.
Most Soviet families lived “salary to salary,” counting rubles and kopecks.The average Soviet salary was just enough to keep one from starving to death.
To buy any food, you had to stand in hour-long queues.
Items produced by the Soviet industry were highly unaffordable: a pair of winter boots cost a month’s salary, a TV – 4 monthly salaries, a car – 100 salaries.
To buy a TV, a large piece of furniture or a car, one had to put his name on the list and wait for years, until the shop sent you a postcard by mail that your item had arrived.
There were no protests in the USSR, not because everyone was happy, but because all those who were dissatisfied were physically destroyed — people were institutionalized as “insane”, where they were quickly turned into vegetables with psychiatric drugs and electric shocks (a valid treatment at the time).
The USSR was closed from the inside by a fence, and border guards were shooting to kill when someone tried to leave the Land of Socialist Happiness. Exit visas to travel abroad were given only to those recommended by a Communist Party Regional Committee and vetted by the KGB for any “spotted” family history (any relatives killed by the Red Terror or sent to GULAG, or any friends or family abroad) — only die-hard communists were allowed to visit even other socialist countries. Maybe 1 in 50 people in the USSR ever been abroad in their whole lives.
Soviet citizens who were allowed to leave the country and emigrate (the USSR signed only one agreement with Israel, allowing Jews to repatriate), were basically stripped of any property and money before they left. They also had to pass series of humiliating “interviews” in the KGB.
This was happening not just in the Soviet Union, but also in all the “socialist” countries of the Eastern Europe that were alighted with Moscow.
When western communists and admirers of Marxism are told these simple facts (and I haven’t even mentioned the worst of them), they are first shocked, then they refuse to accept it, accuse me of lying, and then they proclaim that in the USSR, of course, there was “not real socialism” — but they will build the real one. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Shepherd Pete:
Спасибо, Елена!! Thank you for reminding me onto the wonders of socialism. Everyday one could wonder how that could work. That people were forced to live their whole life — and to die — under these conditions. And to be even thankful for it.
Maybe I told the joke before: After the revolution a journalist from Moscow went to a Yakutian village and interviewed the village eldest: “Could you please tell me how life was before the revolution?” The old man takes a puff from his cigarette and says: “There were just 2 feelings: hunger and coldness.” ‘Well, that's a good start’, thinks the journalist. “Can you please tell us now how the life of your people changed after the glorious October revolution?” The old man took a deep breath. Then he said: “Now there are three feelings: hunger, coldness and thankfulness.”
Mogen Moller:
The so-called Marxism- Leninism was just a masked dictatorship, and when Stalin took over, the paranoia went over the top. Marx would be unable to recognize the Soviet Union as something that had anything to do with his thinking — he was by the way not a Marxist, which he stated himself — and the idea of Russia as the place where capitalism would turn to socialism was very far from his ideas. Russia wasn't even capitalist at that time, but mainly a feudal agricultural country.
It also just ended with a sort of state capitalism, where the workers had no rights. They couldn't even make independent unions. The main focus was on the Cadres, the chosen few that had seen the light and should lead the masses. The system was called democratic centralism. The democratic part never worked, but the centralism did, causing the destruction of millions of lives.
*
THE SHAMAN BATTALION — UKRAINE’S SPECIAL FORCES UNIT THAT OPERATES INSIDE RUSSIA
Sometimes they cross the border by helicopter. Other times, by foot.
But the objective is always the same, says the head of a shadowy Ukraine special operations group known as the Shaman Battalion.
Give the Russians a taste of what Ukrainians have been experiencing since 2014. And especially since Feb. 24, 2022.
“You might have heard about the missiles strike at the shopping mall recently,” the man who goes by the callsign ‘Shaman’ told The War Zone in an exclusive interview. “You’ve definitely heard about Bucha. You’ve heard about the missile strike at the railway station with refugees at Kramatorsk. I wish all these special ops actions would happen on Russian soil now. Because I want them to know the feeling that they give to the people of Ukraine.”
Speaking through an interpreter via Zoom in 2022, Shaman, the leader of the eponymous group, said the battalion is doing its part to make that happen.
Over the course of Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine, images of attacks inside Russia have appeared on social media. They’ve been carried out on a wide array of targets, including an ammunition storage facility, an airbase, and what appeared to be a daring raid by Ukrainian Mi-24 Hind attack helicopters in April that crossed low over the border into Russia and struck an oil storage facility in Belgorod.
While declining to offer details about specific locations of these clandestine missions, Shaman smiles when asked about that raid.
“You know that that explosion on the refinery in Belgorod is not the end,” he said. “It’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
Special operations missions into Russia, or Russian-held Ukrainian territory, is not a new phenomenon, Shaman said.
They began not long after Russia annexed Crimea and invaded Donbas in 2014.
“There were previous missions, multiple big numbers of them, into Crimea and other territories,” said Shaman. “We had some operations in Russia long before 2022. Because Russia actually started this war against Ukraine in 2014, not in 2022.”
Those raids, he said, continue.
“And that’s nothing unusual,” he said, once again declining to offer specifics. “We’re using ordinary tactics of SOF [special operations forces ] units. It’s a routine and right thing to do. We’re raiding their rear. We’re conducting diversions. So there’s nothing really special about it. It’s indeed complicated work to do. But we love it and we’re doing it with pleasure.”
The work may be complicated, but Shaman says planning the missions is not.
“It’s actually it’s quite simple to describe,” he said. “Every time when we’re doing planning, and we’re preparing the mission, it’s ordinary preparation that is done by every special forces unit across the globe. And the tactics we use are the same tactics.”
There is one difference, he said, smiling.
“The only thing is that our plans are always ideal. They always work because our main motto is ‘we’ll get there and then we’ll see.’ So we get there and then we see. That’s why it always goes well.”
Making the decision to go on a raid is not easy. But once it’s made, there is an inner peace.
“The first and the hardest thing to do is you need to come to terms with yourself,” said Shaman. “You’ve got to take that decision. Because you understand that the chances for success most of the times are 50-50 and chances to get back are actually even less than that. But when once the decision is made, it’s quite easy. “
Given the long odds, the only people who go on missions are those who want to, Shaman said.
“We always seek only volunteers. We never task people to do something. They’re volunteers and they’re worth going to Valhalla if they fall in a battle.”
Shaman also heaped tremendous praise on the helicopter pilots who take them on missions.
“What is really important is that we have great helicopter pilots. They’re the guys who have very precise, very outwritten plans that consider all necessary details. They’re super pilots. They’re strong, intelligent, and very highly motivated.”
The pilots, said Shaman, actually do the bulk of the work.
“They help us to infiltrate and they also help us to exfiltrate. They actually are doing the biggest part of the job. Our job on the spot is just to kill everyone, and then they get us back. They practically support what we’re doing and that requires a lot of skill.”
There is, he said, an exhilaration from taking part in these raids: “You feel the cold of your blood and you feel the rush of adrenaline.”
The missions into Russia are “not a big secret,” said Shaman. “Sometimes it happens on a helicopter. Sometimes we go in by foot. Most of the times we’re able to locate the good entry point to fly in or to walk on foot into Russia and then afterwards, what can I say?”
Again, a slight smile creases his face, which is barely visible from behind an olive drab balaclava that covers most of it.
“I want to send my best regards to Belgorod,” he said, referring to the site of the April refinery raid. “I want to suggest to them to make stocks of fuels, grain, maybe flour, and salt. They might need it in future. And also I’d like to ask them to start thinking what’s going on and maybe shake up and start doing something.”
Shaman said his callsign comes from the Ukrainian soothsayers and healers who beat drums as part of their ceremonies.
“There’s this saying that hitting on the face is like hitting at this instrument,” he said. “So I’m good at hitting the face.”
The battalion that takes his name was created after Russia launched its full-scale invasion.
“When this war started, I gathered a bunch of old pirates who were willing, had no fear and complaints, and wanted to defend their country,” said Shaman. “People just started asking, ‘who are those people? Those are Shaman’s people.’ That’s how they started calling the battalion the Shaman battalion.”
Reporting to Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence directorate, the battalion is made up of diverse segments of Ukraine society.
“There are a variety of very different personalities because today in Ukraine there are no shades of grey. There’s only black and white – I mean good and evil. So either you’re either fighting for your country or working to help those who are fighting. If not, it means you are on the other side.”
“That is why the team of people I have are extremely motivated. They are people from various circles and they don’t need any extra motivation or influence. I have ex-generals. I actually have an ex-deputy minister from [the] government who’s fighting in my team now. They are representatives, if you will, of the elite circles of society. But today they’re fighting for this country. With honor, they’re doing the right thing. They have no pity [for] themselves [or] the enemy.”
After about a half-hour of talking, Shaman excused himself, but before leaving, introduced one of his men – the ex-deputy minister.
Dressed in camouflage, he introduced himself by his callsign – Sydney.
A former high-ranking Ukrainian government official, “Sydney” now fights Russians with the Shaman Battalion.
“We’ve known each other before this outbreak of large-scale Russian aggression against us,” Sydney said. “But on the 24th of February, at about six in the morning, was the first time when I met Shaman as my commander.”
There was no entry training course to join the battalion.
“The primary bar is a personal conversation with the battalion commander,” Sydney said. “But then we’re doing polygraphs and it’s a quite ordinary procedure. So we take all the necessary steps.”
Shaman battalion members “all have different levels of training,” said Sydney. “We are people of different ages. Beginning from 18 years up to 50 and we even have a few older guys. As our commander once said, we’re all members of the crew of the last pirate battleship.”
And that, said Sydney, is what makes this unit so interesting.
“The Shaman battalion is not a standard unit. There is a symbiosis of experience and motivation, and I believe this is the reason why some time after I suppose there will be many stories in books or even in movies.”
But the unit’s first mission, to try and secure Antonov Airport in Hostomel near Kyiv, did not go as well as hoped.
“Regretfully there’s been lots of strategic mistakes made that cannot be fixed now, but at least we can extract some experience and some lessons learned from those mistake of ours.”
Preparations for resisting the incoming enemy air assault “were not at the highest level possible,” he said.
“A group of Shaman got its orders and started moving to the airfield right after the first missiles struck at the airfield. We actually had trouble getting there because by that time, citizens of Kyiv, a majority of them, were trying to flee using the very same roads. And it was very hard. It was very complicated just in getting there.”
Once there, “the enemy was already overhead and we weren’t properly ready for the following action. So definitely from the technical perspective, certain needed preparations were not done.”
Russians were already pounding the airfield with missiles.
“There was an impact site of a Tochka-U, which is a big missile,” said Sydney. “Then there were a lot of Sukhoi aircraft that were flying over, dropping stuff.”
After that came the helicopters. Huge waves of them.
“There were over 44 helicopters with air assault troops and our problem on the spot was that we were lacking a means and assets for taking them down in those numbers.”
Sydney then praised the young Ukrainian National Guard troops who stood their ground, firing old Soviet-era man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) at the overwhelming influx of Russia’s vaunted VDV airborne assault troops.
“I would like to give credit to the young boys. Some of them were 18 and 19 years old. Their mission was to guard the airfield and runway itself. They took down a few helicopters and one Sukhoi fighter jet. Despite the fact that they’re people of 18 and 19 years of age, they have balls bigger than many people in this world.”
The attack on the airport was eventually repelled, the biggest in a cascading series of military disasters for Russia that led to their ignominious retreat.
But before they left Antonov Airport, the Russians lashed out, said Sydney, destroying the world’s biggest airplane – the six-engine An-225 cargo jet known worldwide by its nickname Mriya.
“Mriya was just burned down,” said Sydney. “I’m pretty sure it was done on purpose. The Russians are very big on symbolism. They like to pick certain dates and places and even Mriya as a phenomenon was a bone up their throats.”
So, Sydney claims, they destroyed it.
The biggest failure at Antonov Airport wasn’t a lack of weapons, Sydney said. It was not being supplied with more advanced systems.
“The problem was not that they didn’t have Javelins or Stingers. That was not the case. I know for sure.”
The reason, he said, was that “about a year ago we suggested we host a military exercise in that particular airfield.”
The plan was to train for a potential Russian air assault, like the kind that actually happened.
But that was met with resistance from higher-ups.
“When we suggested that, we were told that we have militaristic views,” said Sydney. “And because those people we were talking to didn’t want to believe, or it was hard for them to believe, that Russia may start a large-scale invasion into Ukraine, they didn’t believe us.”
He likened the situation to a Hollywood movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a scientist whose warnings about impending doom fall on deaf and dismissing ears.
“Don’t Look Up shows really well what was going on a year ago here in Ukraine,” he said. “And I believe that to some extent, it will continue.”
Sydney said he can’t talk about any missions into Russia, deferring such discussions to Shaman, his commander.
But overall, the nature of the war has changed.
After their defeat at Antonov Airport, the Russian advance on Kyiv stalled, then fell apart.
As Russian forces retreated north to Belarus, the Shaman battalion was among those Ukrainian forces attacking them on their way out. There was a lot of close-quarters fighting along the way.
“At the very beginning of the conflict, there was a lot of close-fire combat in Moshchun, Irpin, and other small towns next to Kyiv. At that very moment, the Russians didn’t have a good understanding of where they got to.”The nature of the war now is different.
“The only thing today’s Russian army is capable of is hitting from a far distance,” said Sydney, referring to the ongoing and somewhat successful massive long-range fires invading forces are launching against Ukraine in the Donbas area in the east of that country. “The only thing they’re capable of is bombing shopping malls, striking them with their missiles, killing civilians. causing harm to peaceful people. That’s the only thing they are capable of to date.”
So now, with the war a slugfest with neither side making huge gains or suffering catastrophic battlefield defeats, Sydney is prepared for the long haul of what he says may be a generational conflict.
“This war will not stop,” he said. “This war is forever. This war will go on until everything that obstructs us from having our normal simple lives no longer exists.”
And that will take some time.
“I’m sure that our kids will also be fighting,” he said. “And we will get them properly trained. They will be better prepared than we are.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/meet-the-shadowy-ukrainian-unit-that-sabotages-targets-inside-russia?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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HOW TO RAISE SUCCESSFUL BOYS
This is a story about successful kids (especially boys), common sense, and research.
Most of us spend hours each day sitting at work. Science says it's killing us, and we have developed all kinds of fads to combat it—from standing desks to smartphone alerts to get us up and moving.
Armed with that knowledge, however, what do we force our kids to do each day at school? Sit still, for six or eight hours.
Now researchers say that mistake leads us into a three-pronged, perfect storm of problems:
1. We overprotect kids, trying to keep them safe from all physical dangers— which ultimately increases their likelihood of real health issues.
2. We inhibit children's academic growth (especially among boys), because the lack of physical activity makes it harder for them to concentrate.
3. When they fail to conform quietly to this low-energy paradigm, we over-diagnose or even punish kids for reacting the way they're naturally built to react.
Start With the Boys
News flash: Most boys are rambunctious. Often they seem like they're in a constant state of motion: running, jumping, fighting, playing, getting hurt—maybe getting upset—and getting right back into the physical action.
Except at school, where they're required to sit still for long periods of time. (And when they fail to stay still, how are they punished? Often by being forced to skip recess—and thus they sit still longer.)
It's not just an American issue. Researchers at the University of Eastern Finland recently tried to document whether boys actually achieve less in school when they're restricted from running around and being physically active.
They studied 153 kids, aged 6 to 8, and tracked how much physical activity and sedentary time they had during the day. Sure enough, according to a report by Belinda Luscombe in Time, the less "moderate to vigorous physical activity" the boys had each day, the harder it was for them to develop good reading skills:
The more time kids ... spent sitting and the less time they spent being physically active, the fewer gains they made in reading in the two following years. [It] also had a negative impact on their ability to do math.
The results didn't apply to girls. I know that sounds sexist; the researchers offered a few possible explanations. Maybe there simply are physiological differences—or maybe the girls were just as eager to move around as the boys, but they were better able to set aside that disappointment and concentrate.
And for that reason, other researchers say, girls are rewarded more than boys in the classroom.
"Girl behavior is the gold standard in schools," says psychologist Michael Thompson. "Boys are treated like defective girls."
A Dystopian, Scaredy-Cat World
It's not just about less academic achievement, however. Many observers and researchers now say limited physical activity leads to real physical and mental harm in kids—even in the short term, before they've grown up.
Angela Hanscom, a pediatric occupational therapist, interviewed young kids to ask them what recess and play are like in the second decade of the 21st century. Their descriptions sound like a dystopian vision of a scaredy-cat future:
"We have monkey bars, but we aren't allowed to go upside down on them. They think we are going to hurt ourselves. I think I'm old enough to try going upside down."
"We have woods, but can't go anywhere near them. It's too dangerous.”
"When it snows, we can't touch it with our foot, or we have to stand by the teacher for the rest of recess."
Restricting kids' movement like this leads them to increased anger and frustration, less ability to regulate emotions, and higher aggressiveness during the limited times they are allowed to play, Hanscom writes. "Elementary children need at least three hours of active free play a day to maintain good health and wellness. Currently, they are only getting a fraction.”
Expanding the Definition
You probably know that ADHD diagnoses in kids are more likely now than they were in years past, but you might not realize that the number of diagnoses is still rising—and at an alarming rate.
In 2003, for example, it was diagnosed in about 7.8 percent of kids, but that rose to 9.5 percent in 2007 and 11 percent in 2011. That's a 40 percent increase in eight years.
Why? For one thing, we've changed the definition of ADHD to make it more expansive. Many critics argue it's also because of the pharmaceutical industry, since the leading treatment for ADHD is use of the prescription drug Ritalin.
And Hanscom, in a separate article, says it's also because we're forcing kids to sit still longer—and they're simply reacting as nature intended.
"Recess times have shortened due to increasing educational demands, and children rarely play outdoors," she writes. "Lets face it: Children are not nearly moving enough, and it is really starting to become a problem.”
Misaligned Incentives
Of course, these are complicated issues. Nobody wants kids to fail or develop health problems. But given the trends in science and research, why won't more schools at least experiment with including more recess and physical activity in their schedule?
The most commonly cited explanations are both simple and frustrating. Last year, for example, the New Jersey state legislature passed a law requiring public schools to include at least 20 minutes of recess each day—but the governor vetoed it, calling it a "stupid" idea.
Another big adversary is standardized testing, because the time required to prepare for and take tests has to come from somewhere. ("When we have standardized testing, we don't get recess," said one of the students Hansom interviewed. "The teachers give us chewing gum to help us concentrate on those days.")
There is also simple inertia. It's much easier to control a classroom in which the kids have to sit quietly than one where you allow for a little bit of managed chaos. Nobody judges teachers by whether they gave kids enough recess during the day.
And as long as we have overly protective helicopter parents, there will always be fear of liability issues. My free e-book, How to Raise Successful Kids, has more insights and advice on parenting.
Play Around a Bit
There are a few signs of hope. An elementary school in Texas began working four recess periods per day for each child into its schedule, for example. That was a big enough story to make the national news.
Result? Students are "less fidgety and more focused," one teacher said. They "listen more attentively, follow directions, and try to solve problems on their own instead of coming to the teacher to fix everything.”
But this approach is the exception to the rule. Until schools figure out how to incorporate lots of movement and play into their schedules, it will be up to parents to compensate.
So set a good example with your own physical activity, and maybe side with your son (or daughter) if he or she gets in trouble for moving too much at school.
Hanscom reminds us of the stakes: "In order for children to learn, they need to be able to pay attention. In order for them to pay attention, we need to let them move.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/want-to-raise-successful-boys-science-says-do-this-but-their-schools-probably-won-t?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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A COMPLETE UNKNOWN: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG JERK
Surprise! Mangold has sketched a portrait of the artist as a young jerk. Petulant, boorish and full of himself, the future Nobel Prize winner comes off as a real pain, even from the early days when the former Robert Allen Zimmerman, born to a tight-knit Jewish family in Duluth, Minnesota, hitched a ride to New York in 1961 ready to make his name. He was 19.
"A Complete Unknown" wraps up in 1965 when Dylan outraged folk purists at the Newport Folk Festival by plugging in an electric guitar and roaring into the rock phase of his career. His friend Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) urges Dylan "to make some noise, track some mud on the carpet." Dylan didn’t need reminding. His genius is all there in the music.
It’s the music that "A Complete Unknown" gets triumphantly right, with 40 songs, some in frustrating snippets, that power the film to glory. Chalamet prepped years on guitar and harmonica, singing live in a raw Dylan rasp that had me from his first bleating "Hello" to the show-stopping "The Times They Are a Changin." You won’t see a better example of interpretive art this year than Chalamet’s total immersion as Dylan.
So frequent are the music interludes you could justifiably call "A Complete Unknown," a concert film with dramatic interludes that regrettably don’t come close to matching the music.
The film trips up badly on biopic banality, notably when Dylan hooks up with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a pseudonym used at Dylan’s request for art student and political activist Suze Rotolo, pictured with Dylan on the cover of his breakthrough album, "The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan" and the muse for his "Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”
These scenes are the stuff of sudsy soap opera and sanitized into tired cliches that rebuke everything Dylan stands for as a no-bull lyricist. Screen time is better spent watching Dylan immerse himself into the Greenwich Village music scene, vividly recreated on screen. It’s easy to understand the envy Baez feels when she first hears Dylan’s "Blowin’ in the Wind."
It’s folk icon Pete Seeger, played with sly ease and banked fire by an exceptional Edward Norton, who introduces Dylan to a wider audience and to his musical idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), now hospitalized and near mute from the ravages of Huntington’s disease. "I wanted to catch his spark," says Dylan. Mission accomplished.
Guthrie can’t speak when Dylan plays his musical homage, "Song for Woody," but pounds his nightstand in response. Dylan’s caress of Woody’s cheek is a rare display of love. And it hits hard. Dylan meant it when he said that Guthrie’s music "struck me down to the ground."
"A Complete Unknown" pulls too many punches and elides too many facts to show us how it feels to be Dylan, a master at staying masked and anonymous and too slippery to pin down.
It’s the dynamite actor playing him who reveals this shapeshifter in flashes of lightning and enveloping darkness. Chalamet’s transporting performance, one for the time capsule, catches Dylan in the exhilarating act of inventing himself as multitudes, a fugitive troubadour and poet who’s always creating and always in the wind.
Oriana:
Most songs are presented only in fragments. We finally get to hear all of "Blowing in the Wind" and "Mr. Tambourinie Man" only during the credits. Be sure not to leave before the credits are fully over.
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WAS JESUS GAY?
"When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, 'Woman behold your son!' Then he said to the disciple. 'Behold your mother!' And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.”
That disciple was John whom Jesus, the gospels affirm, loved in a special way. All the other disciples had fled in fear. Three women but only one man had the courage to go with Jesus to his execution. That man clearly had a unique place in the affection of Jesus. In all classic depictions of the Last Supper, a favorite subject of Christian art, John is next to Jesus, very often his head resting on Jesus's breast. Dying, Jesus asks John to look after his mother and asks his mother to accept John as her son. John takes Mary home. John becomes unmistakably part of Jesus's family.
Jesus was a Hebrew rabbi. Unusually, he was unmarried. The idea that he had a romantic relationship with Mary Magdalene is the stuff of fiction, based on no biblical evidence. The evidence, on the other hand, that he may have been what we today call gay is very strong. But even gay rights campaigners in the church have been reluctant to suggest it. A significant exception was Hugh Montefiore, bishop of Birmingham and a convert from a prominent Jewish family. He dared to suggest that possibility and was met with disdain, as though he were simply out to shock.
After much reflection and with certainly no wish to shock, I felt I was left with no option but to suggest, for the first time in half a century of my Anglican priesthood, that Jesus may well have been homosexual. Had he been devoid of sexuality, he would not have been truly human. To believe that would be heretical.
Heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual: Jesus could have been any of these. There can be no certainty which. The homosexual option simply seems the most likely. The intimate relationship with the beloved disciple points in that direction. It would be so interpreted in any person today. Although there is no rabbinic tradition of celibacy, Jesus could well have chosen to refrain from sexual activity, whether he was gay or not. Many Christians will wish to assume it, but I see no theological need to. The physical expression of faithful love is godly. To suggest otherwise is to buy into a kind of puritanism that has long tainted the churches.
All that, I felt deeply, had to be addressed on Good Friday. I saw it as an act of penitence for the suffering and persecution of homosexual people that still persists in many parts of the church. Few readers of this column are likely to be outraged any more than the liberal congregation to whom I was preaching, yet I am only too aware how hurtful these reflections will be to most theologically conservative or simply traditional Christians. The essential question for me is: what does love demand? For my critics it is more often: what does scripture say? In this case, both point in the same direction.
Whether Jesus was gay or straight in no way affects who he was and what he means for the world today. Spiritually it is immaterial. What matters in this context is that there are many gay and lesbian followers of Jesus — ordained and lay — who, despite the church, remarkably and humbly remain its faithful members. Would the Christian churches in their many guises more openly accept, embrace and love them, there would be many more disciples.
Rubens: John the Evangelist
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2012/apr/20/was-jesus-gay-probably
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DEAD GALAXIES AND MYSTERIOUS RED DOTS
On December 26th three years ago, we witnessed the nail-biting launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the largest and most powerful telescope humans have ever sent into space.
It took 30 years to build, but in three short years of operation, JWST has already revolutionized our view of the cosmos.
It’s explored our own Solar System, studied the atmospheres of distant planets in search of signs of life and probed the farthest depths to find the very first stars and galaxies formed in the universe.
Here’s what JWST has taught us about the early universe since its launch – and the new mysteries it has uncovered.
Eerie blue monsters
JWST has pushed the boundary of how far we can look into the universe to find the first stars and galaxies. With Earth’s atmosphere out of the way, its location in space makes for perfect conditions to peer into the depths of the cosmos with infrared light.
The current record for the most distant galaxy confirmed by JWST dates back to a time when the universe was only about 300 million years old. Surprisingly, within this short time window, this galaxy managed to form about 400 million times the mass of our Sun.
This indicates star formation in the early universe was extremely efficient. And this galaxy is not the only one.
When galaxies grow, their stars explode, creating dust. The bigger the galaxy, the more dust it has. This dust makes galaxies appear red because the dust absorbs the blue light. But here’s the catch: JWST has shown these first galaxies to be shockingly bright, massive and very blue, with no sign of any dust. That’s a real puzzle.
There are many theories to explain the weird nature of these first galaxies. Do they have huge stars that just collapse due to gravity without undergoing massive supernova explosions?
Or do they have such large explosions that all dust is pushed away far from the galaxy, exposing a blue, dust-free core? Perhaps the dust is destroyed due to the intense radiation from these early exotic stars – we just don’t know yet.
Unusual chemistry in early galaxies
The early stars were the key building blocks of what eventually became life. The universe began with only hydrogen, helium and a small amount of lithium. All other elements, from the calcium in our bones to the oxygen in the air we breathe, were forged in the cores of these stars.
JWST has discovered that early galaxies also have unusual chemical features.
They contain a significant amount of nitrogen, far more than what we observe in our Sun, while most other metals are present in lower quantities. This suggests there were processes at play in the early universe we don’t yet fully understand.
JWST has shown our models of how stars drive the chemical evolution of galaxies are still incomplete, meaning we still don’t fully understand the conditions that led to our existence.
Small things that ended the cosmic dark ages
Using massive clusters of galaxies as gigantic magnifying glasses, JWST’s sensitive cameras can also peer deep into the cosmos to find the faintest galaxies.
We pushed further to find the point at which galaxies become so faint, they stop forming stars altogether. This helps us understand the conditions under which galaxy formation comes to an end.
JWST is yet to find this limit. However, it has uncovered many faint galaxies, far more than anticipated, emitting over four times the energetic photons (light particles) we expected.
The discovery suggests these small galaxies may have played a crucial role in ending the cosmic “dark ages” not long after the Big Bang.
The mysterious case of the little red dots
Initially, they were thought to be massive super-dense galaxies that shouldn’t be possible, but detailed observations in the past year have revealed a combination of deeply puzzling and contradictory properties.
Bright hydrogen gas is emitting light at enormous speeds, thousands of kilometers per second, characteristic of gas swirling around a supermassive black hole.
This phenomenon, called an active galactic nucleus, usually indicates a feeding frenzy where a supermassive black hole is gobbling up all the gas around it, growing rapidly.
But these are not your garden variety active galactic nuclei. For starters: they don’t emit any detectable X-rays, as is normally expected. Even more intriguingly, they seem to have the features of star populations.
Could these galaxies be both stars and active galactic nuclei at the same time? Or some evolutionary stage in between? Whatever they are, the little red dots are probably going to teach us something about the birth of both supermassive black holes and stars in galaxies.
What’s next for JWST?
Just within its first steps, the telescope has revealed many shortcomings of our current models of the universe. While we are refining our models to account for the updates JWST has brought us, we are most excited about the unknown unknowns.
The mysterious red dots were hiding from our view. What else is lingering in the depths of cosmos? JWST will soon tell us.
https://theconversation.com/from-dead-galaxies-to-mysterious-red-dots-heres-what-the-james-webb-telescope-has-found-in-just-3-years-243592?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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OUR SUN MAY HAVE HAD A TWIN
The star at the center of our Solar System could have had a sibling long ago – the question is, where did it go?
Many stars in our galaxy exist in pairs, but our Sun is a notable exception. Now scientists are finding clues that it may once have had a companion of its own. The question is, where did it go?
Our Sun is a bit of an isolated nomad. Orbiting in one of the Milky Way's spiral arms, it takes us on a a journey around the galaxy roughly once every 230 million years.
The nearest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away, so remote that it would take even the fastest spacecraft ever built more than 7,000 years to reach.
Everywhere we look in our galaxy however, the star at the center of our Solar System seems like more and more of an anomaly. Binary stars – stars that orbit the galaxy inexorably linked together as pairs – appear to be common. Recently astronomers have even spotted a pair orbiting in surprisingly close proximity to the supermassive black hole that sits at the heart of the Milky Way – a location that astrophysicists thought would cause the stars to be ripped apart from each other or squashed together by the intense gravity.
In fact, discoveries of binary star systems are now so common that some scientists believe that perhaps all stars were once in binary relationships – born as pairs, each with a stellar sibling. That has led to an intriguing question: was our own Sun once a binary star too, its companion lost long ago?
It's definitely a possibility, says Gongjie Li, an astronomer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US. "And it's very interesting."
Fortunately for us, our Sun does not have a companion today. If it did, the gravitational pull of a solar sibling could have disrupted the orbit of the Earth and the other planets, condemning our home to lurches from extreme heat to terrible cold in a way that may have been too inhospitable for life.
The closest binary stars to Earth, Alpha Centauri A and B, orbit each other at about 24 times the Earth-Sun distance, or 3.6 billion miles. Suggestions that our Sun could also have a faint companion circling our Solar System today – a hypothetical star often called Nemesis – have fallen out of favor since they were first proposed in 1984 after no such star was found in multiple surveys and studies.
But when our Sun first formed 4.6 billion years ago, however, it may have been a different matter.
The Sun provides much of the energy needed for life, but who knows what would have happened to Earth had there been a solar sibling around.
Stars form when giant clouds of dust and gas tens of light-years across cool and clump together. The material inside these nebulae – as these cocoons of gas and dust are known – collapse together under gravity into ever growing lumps. As it does so, it begins to warm up over millions of years, eventually igniting nuclear fusion to create a protostar with a disk of remnant debris spinning around it, which forms planets.
In 2017, Sarah Sadavoy, an astrophysicist at Queen's University in Canada, used data from a radio survey of the Perseus molecular cloud – a stellar nursery filled with young binary star systems – to conclude that the process of star formation might preferentially form protostars in pairs. Indeed, she and her colleagues found it was so likely that they suggested all stars might form in pairs or multi-star systems.
"You get little density spikes within those cocoons, and those are able to collapse and form multiple stars, which we call a fragmentation process," says Sadavoy. "If they're very far away [from each other], they might never interact. But if they're much closer, gravity has a chance to keep them bound together.”
Sadavoy's work showed that it was possible that all stars once started as a binary, and while some remain bound together indefinitely, others would break apart rapidly within a million years. "Stars live for billions of years," she says. "It is a blip in the grand scheme of things. But so much happens in that blip.”
That raises the question of whether the same might have been true of our Sun. There's no reason to think it wasn't, says Sadavoy. But "if we did form with a companion, we lost it", she says.
There are some tantalizing clues emerging our Sun was once part of a binary system. In 2020, Amir Siraj, an astrophysicist at Harvard University in the US, suggested that a region of icy comets that surrounds our Solar System far beyond Pluto, called the Oort Cloud, might contain an imprint of this companion star. This frigid shell of ice and rock is so far away that the most distant spacecraft ever launched by humankind – Voyager 1 – will not reach it for at least another 300 years. (Read more about what the Voyager missions are teaching us about the weird space on the outskirts of our Solar System.)
If our Sun did have a companion, then it would have resulted in more dwarf planets like Pluto existing in this region, says Siraj. It might also have led to a larger planet ending up here, like the hypothesized Neptune-sized world Planet Nine that some astronomers believe remains undiscovered in our Sun's outer reaches. (Read more about the mystery of Planet Nine in this article by Zaria Gorvett.)
"It's hard to produce quite as many objects in the furthest reaches of the Oort Cloud as we see" without a companion star, says Siraj, with billions or even trillions of objects orbiting in the Oort Cloud. If an additional planet like Planet Nine were to be found, explaining how such a planet ended up so far from the Sun is "really hard", says Siraj, unless we invoke the disrupting gravitational hand of a companion star. "It could boost the capture of comets and the chances of the Solar System capturing a planet," he says.
However, in a recently published research paper, Batygin suggests that the inner edge of the Oort Cloud could be explained by a companion star. "What we found by doing computer simulations is that as objects get scattered out, they start to interact with the binary companion," says Batygin. "They can detach from the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn and get trapped in the inner Oort Cloud.”
It might be possible to confirm if this idea is true with a new telescope in Chile, called the Vera Rubin Observatory, set to switch on next year and perform the most detailed survey ever of the night sky over the following 10 years. "As Vera Rubin comes online and begins to really map out the structure of the Oort Cloud in greater detail, we can see if there's a clear thumbprint of the binary companion," says Batygin.
Another possible signature of a binary companion's impact is that our Sun is tilted very slightly, by about seven degrees, to the plane of the Solar System. A possible explanation for this is the gravitational pull of another star, which tilted our Sun off balance. "I think the most natural explanation is the presence of a companion star early on," says Batygin, an effect that we see in other binary stars throughout the galaxy.
But even if this early evidence does turn out to be correct, finding our Sun's missing twin may be a far more challenging prospect. It is likely that any companion would now be "lost among the sea of stars that we see in the night sky", says Sadavoy.
However, stars born in the same region of space as our Sun might have a similar composition because they will have been forged from the same mix of gases and dust, making them all veritable siblings. In 2018, scientists identified one such a "twin" star of our Sun, with a similar size and chemical composition located less than 200 light-years away.
Before we get too excited, however, it is worth remembering that the cloud of gas and dust in which our Sun was born also probably formed "hundreds or thousands of stars", says Sadavoy. All of these would have a similar composition, meaning there would be no way to know if any were our Sun's true companion. Even then, any companion of our Sun might not have been a similarly sized star. "It could have been a [smaller] red dwarf star, or a hotter, bluer star," says Sadavoy.
Astronomers are starting to find exoplanets around binary star systems, which could mean they would have twin suns in the sky.
While finding and identifying our Sun's possible companion seems daunting, the prospect that it was once a binary star raises interesting implications for planets around other stars, known as exoplanets. Most notably, it would demonstrate that in our Solar System, the existence of life and the survival of our planets was not diminished by the presence of another star. "There are many discovered exoplanetary systems that actually orbit stellar binaries," says Li. Some of those orbit one of the two stars, known as circumstellar systems, while others orbit both of the stars and have skies with two suns like the fictional planet Tatooine in Star Wars. These are called circumbinary systems.
Sometimes we do see binary companions causing havoc with such systems, though. "It depends on how far away the star is," says Li. If the star is closer in, it can "kick the planetary orbits" and push them into eccentric, non-circular shapes. "In circumstellar systems, the planets could have a high eccentricity," says Li. "But this may not necessarily make them unstable." It can, however, cause the planet to experience large changes in temperature as it swings closer to and further from the star, he says.
For our own planet, it seems that the possible existence of a binary companion to our Sun long ago did not hinder our own existence. And as scientists examine the furthest regions of our Solar System in ever more detail, they may well uncover more signs that it once did exist – a lasting signature waiting to be found.
If it does exist it could be out there, somewhere, with a solar system all of its own. "It might not have trailed too far behind or ahead," says Sadavoy. "Or it could be on the other side of the galaxy and we would not know.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241223-the-search-for-the-suns-missing-twin
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PARKINSON’S DISEASE AND THE GUT MICROBIOME
It can start small: a peculiar numbness; a subtle facial tic; an inexplicably stiff muscle. But then time goes by — and eventually, the tremors set in.
Roughly a million people in the United States (and roughly 10 million people worldwide) live with Parkinson’s disease, a potent neurological disorder that progressively kills neurons in the brain. As it does so, it can trigger a host of crippling symptoms, from violent tremors to excruciating muscle cramps, terrifying nightmares and constant brain fog. While medical treatments can alleviate some of these effects, researchers still don’t know exactly what causes the disease to occur in the first place.
A growing number of studies, however, are suggesting that it may be tied to an unlikely culprit: bacteria living inside our guts.
Every one of us has hundreds or thousands of microbial species in our stomach, small intestine and colon. These bacteria, collectively called our gut microbiome, are usually considerate guests: Although they survive largely on food that passes through our insides, they also give back, cranking out essential nutrients like niacin (which helps our body convert food into energy) and breaking down otherwise indigestible plant fiber into substances our bodies can use.
As Parkinson’s advances in the brain, researchers have reported that the species of bacteria present in the gut also shift dramatically, hinting at a possible cause for the disease. A 2022 paper published in the journal Nature Communications recorded those differences in detail. After sequencing the mixed-together genomes of fecal bacteria from 724 people — a group with Parkinson’s and another without — the authors saw a number of distinct changes in the guts of people who suffered from the disease.
The Parkinson’s group had dramatically lower amounts of certain species of Prevotella, a type of bacterium that helps the body break down plant-based fiber (changes like this in gut flora could explain why people with Parkinson’s disease often experience constipation). At the same time, the study found, two harmful species of Enterobacteriaceae, a family of microbes that includes Salmonella, E. coli and other bugs, proliferated. Those bacteria may be involved in a chain of biochemical events that eventually kill brain cells in Parkinson’s patients, says Tim Sampson, a biologist at Emory University School of Medicine and coauthor of the study.
At first glance, the relationship between bacteria and brain disease isn’t exactly obvious. How can a change in gut microbes kick off a devastating neurodegenerative disorder? The relationship between the two may seem counterintuitive — but Sampson says it comes down to the subtle ways that the brain and the gut are connected.
In the walls of the intestines, a network of neurons called the enteric nervous system lets the body sense what’s going on in the gut and respond accordingly. This circuitry controls muscle movement, local blood flow, secretion of mucus and other essential digestive functions.
Since the cells of the enteric nervous system are embedded in the gut wall, many of them come into close contact with the lumen — the cavity of the gut that contains the microbiome — where they can interact directly with biochemicals created by bacteria. Some of these are sticky proteins called curli (pronounced CURL-eye) that may be implicated in Parkinson’s.
Under normal circumstances, curli proteins let Enterobacteria build biofilms, the gooey mats that protect the microbes and help them stay put in the gut. Yet if a curli molecule touches a common protein created by nerve cells — called alpha-synuclein — that protein begins to misfold and form a dangerous mass called an aggregate. Once created, these aggregates can spread widely though the nervous system, leapfrog from cell to cell and eventually enter the brain through the vagus nerve, the main pathway that carries signals between the brain and the gut. It’s thought that in some cases of Parkinson’s in humans, changes in the gut microbiome may activate that process, says Emeran Mayer, a gastroenterologist and neuroscientist at UCLA and coauthor of an overview of the gut-brain connection in the Annual Review of Medicine.
Suspicion that the vagus plays a key role in neurodegenerative disease has been growing in recent years. A 2017 study in the journal Neurology, Mayer notes, showed that “If you cut the vagus nerve, it decreases the risk for Parkinson’s disease. That’s a pretty strong indication that … this degenerative material is transported, apparently, through the vagus nerve.”
Over the past few decades, a number of animal studies have shown that the vagus provides a physical conduit that molecules can use to move between the gut and brain — but although this neurological superhighway could play an important role in Parkinson’s, it’s still not clear if the nerve is a lynchpin in causing the disease itself.
The vagus nerve (shown in yellow) is a physical conduit between the gut and brain that might traffic misfolded proteins that trigger Parkinson’s disease, scientists suggest.
In addition to aggregates moving through the vagus, different triggers — like the lipids, vitamins and other organic compounds that gut bacteria produce — could travel through blood vessels to the brain, where they may cause inflammation and damage tissue. Likewise, says David Hafler, a neuroimmunologist at Yale University, immune cells that are activated in the gut may contribute to the neurological damage and dysfunction that occurs in Parkinson’s.
These immune cells, called T cells, can migrate out of the gut, enter the bloodstream and cross the blood-brain barrier, where they ultimately may kill off neurons. This sort of autoimmune response is the driver for other neurological diseases like multiple sclerosis, Hafler reasons, so it’s feasible that it plays a role in Parkinson’s as well. In both diseases, changes in the gut microbiome could be the potential trigger.
There’s already strong evidence for this idea. In 2016, Sampson found a direct connection between gut microbes and Parkinson’s disease: Using fecal samples from Parkinson’s patients, Sampson inoculated the guts of germ-free mice (animals with no naturally occurring microbiome), and the animals quickly developed Parkinson’s symptoms. Today, using the new genetic survey of gut microbes he and his colleagues published in Nature Communications, he’s narrowing in on a few microbe families and using similar methods to reveal which precise species are the culprits.
Sampson’s approach comes with some caveats: Parkinson’s disease, after all, might be linked to multiple bacteria interacting in complex ways — so there likely won’t be a single smoking gun. It’s also not totally clear if changes in the microbiome are the root cause or if they just accelerate damage already taking place in the brain.
The complexity of the microbiome is mind-boggling: There are hundreds of different types of bacteria involved, and each creates myriad molecules that affect digestion, the immune system and other important bodily functions. Sorting through all those components and identifying how they change in the face of disease will be an important next step.
And so, as tantalizing as the links between the microbiome and Parkinson’s may be, it could be decades before people who suffer from the disorder can reap any tangible benefits. Many of the researchers examining those links, like Mayer, also warn patients to be of wary of sweeping claims about drugs, supplements or even fecal transplants — seeding the gut with microbes from another, healthy person — that “treat” Parkinson’s by altering the microbiome.
“A lot of people make a lot of money selling individuals supplements, telling you that they’re going to slow your cognitive decline or prevent Parkinson’s disease,” says Mayer. But, he adds, “we don’t know the causal roles of the microbiome for sure. We know it from animal studies, so we have indirect evidence for it — but it’s been difficult to show in humans without a doubt that the microbes, and some of their signal molecules, play the main causal role.”
Until definitive answers are found, researchers like Mayer will continue to chip away at the problem, microbe by microbe.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-gut-bacteria-connect-to-parkinson-s-disease?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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HOW LONG COULD HUMANS LIVE?
How long can human beings live? Although life expectancy has increased significantly over the past century, thanks largely to improved sanitation and medicine, research into hunter-gatherer populations suggests that individuals who escaped disease and violent deaths could live to about their seventh or eighth decade.
This means our typical human life span may be static: around 70 years, with an extra decade or so for advanced medical care and cautious behavior. Some geneticists believe a hard limit of around 115 years is essentially programmed into our genome by evolution.
Other scientists in the fast-moving field of aging research, or geroscience, think we can live much longer. A handful of compounds have been shown to lengthen the life spans of laboratory animals slightly, yet some scientists are more ambitious—a lot more ambitious.
João Pedro de Magalhães, a professor of molecular biogerontology at the Institute of Inflammation and Ageng at the University of Birmingham in England, thinks humans could live for 1,000 years. He has scrutinized the genomes of very long-lived animals such as the bowhead whale (which can reach 200 years) and the naked mole rat. His surprising conclusion: if we eliminated aging at the cellular level, humans could live for a millennium—and potentially as long as 20,000 years.
How can that be? If aging is programmed, scientists could theoretically reprogram our cells by tweaking genes that are central to aging. This would require technology that we don’t presently have, but Magalhães thinks it can be created. His great-grandfather died of pneumonia—a leading cause of mortality in the 1920s. When Magalhães contracted the same disease as a child, he was cured with a simple dose of penicillin. He thinks scientists can similarly develop therapies for aging, an endeavor to which he has now devoted his career. “I want to cheat death,” he says bluntly.
How has cheating death worked out so far?
I don’t think we’re going to have a drug that “cures” aging the way penicillin cures infections anytime soon. But a compound called rapamycin is quite promising. It extends life span by 10 to 15 percent in animals, and it is approved for human use, such as for organ transplant recipients. It does have side effects. I am optimistic that we will develop drugs akin to statins [taken daily to lessen risk of heart disease] that we take every day for longevity purposes. If you could slow down human aging 10 or even 5 percent, that would still be pretty amazing.
How does rapamycin work?
Rapamycin does quite a number of things in the cell, but a lot of its effects [involve] slowing down growth and slowing down cell metabolism, which is why it has an impact on aging.
Your grandmother lived to be 103 years old. Did she take rapamycin, or was her long life linked to something else?
I think it was the sun and the beach [laughs]. We know that to become a centenarian is mostly genetic. My grandmother didn’t really exercise, and she didn’t eat very healthily. She didn’t smoke; she didn’t have very bad habits, but she also didn’t have particularly healthy habits. Yet she was quite healthy almost until the end—she was barely in hospital. With her it came down to genetics, environment and some luck.
You’ve sequenced genomes of very long-lived animals such as the bowhead whale, which lives up to 200 years. How are their genes different from ours, and what can we learn from them?
Various long-lived animals, such as humans, whales and elephants, all have to cope with the same issues, such as cancer, but they use different molecular tricks to achieve their longevity. With bowhead whales, they seem to have much better DNA repair. My dream experiment is to take a bowhead whale gene and implant it in a mouse to see if the mouse would then live longer.
Another obvious example would be the p53 gene, which is very strongly associated with cancer suppression. Elephants have multiple copies of this gene, which makes them resistant to cancer. There are a few other candidate genes that we’ve discovered, not only in whales but in rodents such as the naked mole rat.
Why are naked mole rats so interesting?
Naked mole rats are fascinating because they can live up to 30 years, yet they are smaller than a rat, which only lives to about four years. So you have a small rodent that’s related to mice and rats but lives much longer and is very cancer-resistant.
What’s their secret?
In terms of cancer resistance and probably overall aging as well, it’s their ability to respond to and repair DNA damage. But the threshold for a mouse cell to become a cancer cell is much lower than [the threshold] in humans. If you expose mouse cells to DNA damage, they will get cancer; if you expose naked mole rat cells to the same damage, it’s going to be fixed. They won’t get cancer.
So if mice live several years, and naked mole rats live 30 years, and we live about 80 years, does that mean life spans are genetically programmed?
The dominant theory of aging was about wear and tear—damage accumulating in our cells and components of our body like cars that break down over time. I’ve never really liked that because humans are not inanimate objects. There is damage, of course, and often aging seems to be very deterministic, almost like a program.
A mouse will age 20 to 30 times faster than a human being. There are a lot of aging [characteristics] that just happen to everybody and even across species, such as loss of muscle mass. This doesn’t seem like something that’s random; it seems predetermined. So I think of aging as more akin to a software problem than a hardware problem.
My hypothesis is that we have a very complicated set of computerlike programs in our DNA that turn us into an adult human being. But maybe some of these same programs, as they continue into later life, become detrimental.
What’s an example of that?
A classic example would be thymus involution. Your thymus is a gland that produces T cells, which are very important to your immune system. But it disappears fairly early in life, around age 20—earlier if you’re obese; later if you’re an athlete. Basically it turns into fat. That strikes me as very programmatic. It’s a classic case of antagonistic pleiotropy, where a process that is beneficial earlier in life becomes harmful later on.
Why is the immune system important in aging?
The immune system, I think, is a low-hanging fruit in terms of targeting aging. It has systemic impacts, and it declines over time, which is why diseases like COVID become very dangerous to old people. But there are specific tissues, such as the thymus, that you can target for rejuvenation. To me, that’s one way of starting. There are experiments in mice that show that if you change just one transcription factor [a protein that acts on genetic material], the thymus regenerates. In theory, I am convinced we can have radical interventions like this—to rewrite our genetic “software” and redesign human biology—to delay or even reverse aging. In practice, it is difficult, but in theory, I think there’s a huge potential.
How much potential is there? How long could we live if we got rid of aging?
I actually did some calculations years ago and found that if we could “cure” human aging, average human life span would be more than 1,000 years. Maximum life span, barring accidents and violent death, could be as long as 20,000 years. This may sound like a lot, but some species can already live hundreds of years—and in some cases thousands of years [such as the hexactinellid sponge and the Great Basin bristlecone pine]. If we could redesign our biology to eliminate cancer and evade the detrimental actions of our genetic software program, the health benefits would be mind-boggling.
This sounds extreme. Are such profound interventions even possible?
I think it’s possible. Is it going to happen soon? I think it’s quite unlikely. Even if you can figure out how aging works, it is not easy to develop interventions. I am an aspiring science-fiction writer as well, and one thing I’ve noticed are these novels that are set 100 or 1,000 years from now, in a future with all kinds of technology that enables people to do incredible things, such as travel between stars—and people are still aging. But I think we’ll figure out aging by then.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-old-can-humans-get/
Oriana: ASHWAGANDA LOWERS CORTISOL
Just as berberine is an excellent equivalent of metformin, with extra benefits, so ashwaganda may turn out to be similar in action to rapamycin. Unfortunately our knowledge of ashwaganda is not what it should be, given its medicinal use for thousands of years. Ashwaganda has the ability to lower cortisol, among its many benefits. The lowering of cortisol can lower anxiety and improve sleep. However, some think it should be taken intermittently rather than every day.
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BENEFITS OF CARROTS
Carrots provide soluble fiber.
Pectin is the main form of soluble fiber in carrots.
Soluble fibers can lower blood sugar levels by slowing down your digestion of sugar and starch.
They can also feed the friendly bacteria in your gut, which may lead to improved health and decreased risk of disease.
What’s more, certain soluble fibers can impair the absorption of cholesterol from your digestive tract, lowering blood cholesterol.
The main insoluble fibers in carrots are cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin. Insoluble fibers may reduce your risk of constipation and promote regular bowel movements.
A source of vitamins and minerals
Carrots are a good source of several vitamins and minerals, especially biotin, potassium, and vitamins A (from beta carotene), K1 (phylloquinone), and B6.
Vitamin A: Carrots are rich in beta-carotene, which your body converts into vitamin A. This nutrient promotes good vision and is important for growth, development, and immune function.
Biotin: A B vitamin formerly known as vitamin H, biotin plays an important role in fat and protein metabolism.
Vitamin K1: Also known as phylloquinone, vitamin K1 is important for blood coagulation and can promote bone health.
Potassium: An essential mineral, potassium is important for blood pressure management.
Vitamin B6: A group of related vitamins, B6 is involved in the conversion of food into energy.
Other compounds
Carrots offer many plant compounds, including carotenoids.
These are substances with powerful antioxidant activity that have been linked to improved immune function and reduced risk of many illnesses, including heart disease, various degenerative ailments, and certain types of cancer.
Beta carotene, the main carotene in carrots, can be converted into vitamin A in your body. However, this conversion process may vary by individual. Eating fat with carrots can help you absorb more of the beta carotene.
The main plant compounds in carrots are:
Beta carotene: Orange carrots are very high in beta carotene. The absorption is better if the carrots are cooked.
Alpha-carotene: This is an antioxidant that, like beta-carotene, is partly converted into vitamin A in your body. associated with heart and eye health, improved digestion, and even weight loss. Several studies seem to demonstrate that alpha-carotene is much more effective in decreasing mortality for certain forms of cancer (lung, prostate, liver, etc.) and reducing the risk of cardiovascular mortality. α-Carotene is especially high in orange carrots and some pumpkins.
Lutein: One of the most common antioxidants in carrots, lutein is predominantly found in yellow and orange carrots and is important for eye health.
Lycopene: This is a bright red antioxidant found in many red fruits and vegetables, including red and purple carrots. Lycopene may decrease your risk of cancer and heart disease. Cooking carrots helps release lycopene and improves absorption.
Polyacetylenes: Recent research has identified bioactive compounds in carrots that may help protect against leukemia and other cancers.
Anthocyanins: These are powerful antioxidants found in dark-colored carrots.
Reduced risk of cancer
Diets rich in carotenoids may help protect against several types of cancer. This includes prostate, colon, and stomach cancers.
Females with high circulating levels of carotenoids may also have a reduced risk of breast cancer.
Carotenoids have been found to protect against lung cancer, but further research is needed to confirm a correlation.
Lower blood cholesterol
High blood cholesterol is a well-known risk factor for heart disease.
Consuming carrots has been linked to lower cholesterol levels.
Weight loss
As a low calorie food, carrots can increase fullness and decrease calorie intake in subsequent meals.
For this reason, they may be a useful addition to an effective weight loss diet.
Eye health
Individuals with low vitamin A levels are more likely to experience night blindness, a condition that may diminish by eating carrots or other foods rich in vitamin A or carotenoids.
Carotenoids may also cut your risk of age-related macular degeneration.
In summary: Carrots are associated with heart and eye health, improved digestion, and even weight loss.
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ending on beauty:
FIRST DAY OF WINTER
Afterwards I whispered
you know I will write
about you have no fear
you will not be recognized
your voice will be wind
your eyes will be clouds
your shoulders the wings
of remaining light
~ Oriana
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